return the goods is Housemarque’s funniest and most ambitious game yet. It builds on everything the studio has perfected over the years–satisfying arcade-style combat, particle-laden visuals, and tightly-constructed levels that always leave you wanting more.
If you’re a fan of Housemarque, you can safely expect all of these qualities to be present in its games, but you might no How expect transfers the same principles that have guided it for years into a third-person perspective. In a way, it not only justified the shift, but tapped into the game’s rogue-like nature in a way few games can.
Returnal is a game about Selene, an astronaut who can’t break out of a dreadful loop she’s trapped in. It begins with her crash-landing on an alien planet for what appears to be the first time, until she encounters the dead body of herself in the past – a failed attempt – and realizes that she’s been reliving that moment endlessly, returning forever. Countless times she has been killed by tentacled Lovecraft monsters’ projectiles, their lunges, or their failed jumps.
Every time she returns, the world changes – hence the roguelike nature. Selene’s planet, Atropos, appears to run on a different timeline than her own. As you play the game, you’ll be exposed to new rooms and new events that continue to build on the story. If you like to poke around every corner, you’ll find more codes that will allow you to understand the language of the people who lived there and understand their monuments.
All of this is coming to PC, including all the post-launch updates the original game received. You can play it in co-op mode, and you can pause your run if you want to stop and pick it up later—many of us who played it when the PS5 launched didn’t have that luxury.
However, the PC version is better in every way. Just plug in a DualSense controller and enjoy the same tactile and pulse-triggered effects. All the 3D audio magic that enhances the experience on Sony’s consoles is also here, and the game even offers several different versions of audio virtualization.
The benefits of playing games on a PC are many. The main thing is that you can play it with a mouse at hundreds of frame rates, far higher than what you can get on the PS5. Depending on your hardware, you may even experience cleaner, more visually stunning presentations.
But what really makes the PC the best place to play Returnal is how well thought out this port is. There are many options, each offering multiple levels of quality. You can upsample, downsample or use any popular image reconstruction techniques like DLSS and FSR.
Climax, the studio responsible for the PC port, made this so that anyone unfamiliar with what each setting affects can still navigate and understand the menu. Each option has a description, along with guidance on whether they are CPU or GPU intensive.
On top of that is Returnal’s benchmarking tool, which is one of the most informative I’ve seen for a PC game — let alone a port. It offers the same level of granularity as games like Gears 4 and 5, and I’d say it even goes beyond key areas.
The benchmark not only runs through real game scenarios, but its different stages target specific domains: destruction, visual effects, reflections, etc. It also tells you which effects are pushing your CPU and GPU, and ends with a breakdown of the data collected through it. It allows you to make the decisions you need to hit your framerate goals, and even helps with some recommendations and easy access to a settings menu where you can quickly tweak settings and retest.
Other than some random stutters, Returnal works fine on my PC. Although it precompiles shaders on first launch, there are occasional stutters when moving quickly through its detailed rooms. This may be related to asset flow. Although I have it installed on Gen.3 NVMe, it is nowhere near as fast as the one in PS5.
The game’s PC specs call for high-end 32GB RAM, likely to bypass drive speeds on the PC. My computer has i7-9700K, 3080 Ti and 16GB RAM. Even so, with all settings maxed out and ray tracing on medium, I rarely dropped below 80-85fps at 4K with balanced DLSS.
There’s a level late in Returnal that easily has the most striking structure in the game. It combines themes with music and builds up (both physically and emotionally) to make it clear to anyone who’s been paying attention to the story that they’re about to witness something special.
The rogue-like nature of Returnal means that many players won’t get to experience this level (and many players certainly won’t experience it on PS5 either). But if you stick with it, you’ll experience exhilaration, sadness, and triumph in a way few games can provide. Returnal’s most memorable moments come when all of its individual elements come together, singing and clanging to the same beat.
If nothing else, I hope being on a bigger platform means more people will get into that trance.
Impressions based on PC code provided by Sony.
